.self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting

That all the cool 2-letter TLDs are designated as country codes was an extraordinary mistake that will have unpredictable and devastating consequences long into the future.

It's a commons-pollution problem. Are we going to have to start thinking of every word with a dot in the middle as a potential name? IMHO, a new gTLD is justifiable only when there's some concrete differentiator attached to it, e.g. .local indicating mDNS, or .it indicating "Italy"

What value is there in "horse.horse" being something you can resolve with DNS? What value does <something>.self give me, as a reader, that <something>.name or <something>.me or any of the other zillion variations on the same idea doesn't?

If anything, it creates confusion! "Oh, I met Bob McBobFace. Is he mcbobface.me? mcbobface.name? mcbobface.local?".

I have no objection to providing people with free subdomains under whatever assignment scheme you guys are using, but wouldn't <something>.net have worked too, and been a lot cheaper?

I guess I just don't get the value to the public of increasing the set of dotted word suffixes that indicate that a word is a a cognizable DNS object.

So the new gTLD round is open right now, we're getting more TLDs whether we like it or not. Our goal is to make one that has features built-in which cater to the self-hosting use case. So that is our key differentiator, that every endpoint leveraging our TLD should be someone's small-scale homelab setup.

> I have no objection to providing people with free subdomains under whatever assignment scheme you guys are using, but wouldn't <something>.net have worked too, and been a lot cheaper?

Technically yes it could work, but given the suite of features we'd like to build into our TLD, it would make things more difficult if we didn't own it. We would be dependent on external parties for our root domain, the root of trust for TLS certificates, all users' subdomains would have an extra dot etc.

Everything else on your roadmap could have been built and shipped in the universe that exists, and then if down the road it's working, you could have aimed for your own TLD.

Instead you're putting the TLD first and any of the actual functionality that end users might want afterwards.

The marketing stuff makes it look like the TLD is your main focus.

Even gTLDs using other languages, like .kaufen, are under US jurisdiction. A German website selling to German customers using a .kaufen domain is forced to abide by US law as well as German law or loses the domain. Using a .de domain they would only have to abide by German law. That's unfair that the US government gets to stick its grubby fingers into every TLD that isn't a country code.

You're right in a sense, but the US invented the internet, so they get to invent the rules, no?

.zip .pdf .mp3

I'd like to thank Caribbean island of Anguilla for having a ccTLD that helps identify which websites aren't worth your time in one quick look.

However .me (https://namegulf.com/tld/cctld/me) is a ccTLD managed by the Government of Montenegro, they set their own rules

That sounds like negative utility. That would make hosting an email server on one of your domains harder than hosting it on a .com, so what benefit is this providing?

0 - https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8375.html

> We do not recommend use of unregistered top-level domains at all, but should network operators decide to do this, the following top-level domains have been used on private internal networks without the problems caused by trying to reuse ".local." for this purpose:

      .intranet.
      .internal.
      .private.
      .corp.
      .home.
      .lan.

dancing.with.my.self

reference.self

interest.self

pleasure.self

gratification.self

b.true@to.thine.own.self

touch.a.touch.a.touch.a.touch.me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x92ccvZCzlg

  write.it.your.self
  think.4.your.self
  written.by.my.self

Edit: I've been rate limited because of this comment, apparently. Account burned - will make a new one. Dang says below it's because of flagged comments but I don't see many flagged comments in my history.

We rate limited you because of flamewar comments you posted in another thread, like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48723651. You posted over 50 times in that thread, and many of your comments there broke the site guidelines. That's abusive. If we didn't rate limit accounts for doing that, we might as well have no guidelines or restrictions at all.

https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db

Is this just an idea at this point, or some kind of "you have to use our DNS to resolve .self domains" scheme - ?

Inb4 they give away .docx

(Yes, the domain "readme.md" exists. Fortunately, whoever owns it is not using their power for evil and does not have any webserver there... but I'm not risking it.)

Cloudflare offers this now (their Pay to Crawl service) but its not geared towards every human getting paid for their content. As of today Facebook and other social media platforms profit from our content....not us!

- Centralized authorities for IP & DNS assignment? You (+anyone else you can convince) can just ignore that and it'll work in your bubble anyways!

- No centralized authorities for IP & DNS assignment? You (+anyone else you can convince) can just ignore that and it'll work in your bubble anyways!

My above pedantry aside, the article is explicitly about "The Internet" (it's even using the capital "I" oft forgotten about these days). I.e. the worldwide bubble which has centrally controlled assignment via ICANN/IANA, separate from other systems using the DNS/IP protocols. That's why it talks about ICANN and why bananamogul mentioned .self has not been centrally registered with IANA yet.

I remember publishing a website for a class on my .tk domain, the teacher couldn't open it and I almost got a failing grade because of it.